So, you introduced Learning Teams? How's that working out for you?

Every man, woman and their dog seems to be offering the 'magical elixir' of Learning Teams right now. "Cross my palm with silver and I'll reveal the tip top secret of Learning Teams according to me!" is definitely the mantra of 2023 in the worlds of HOP and Safety Differently; In fact, there is a veritable 'all you can eat' buffet of offerings on LinkedIn at the moment - to find the 'how' just pick your poison. Expensive classroom training, virtual training, e-learning, DIY Books, listen and learn Podcasts, Youtube videos, webinars, etc. Yep - everyone seems to be on the gravy train.

As for the 'who', you also have a lot of choice right now - so many 'Gurus' from serious, stuffy Academics to former corporate safety people trying to earn a quick buck; there is someone out there for everyone! Hell, we'll even teach you how to facilitate a Learning Team!

Unfortunately there is also a lot of confusion about the purpose and use of Learning Teams; I am discovering a lot of organisations recently who have invested heavily in this supposed panacea only to find that their experience is poor and the process is expensive and doesn't add any value!

Yes there is a time and a place for Learning Teams but it's not all the time or in every place and not every organisation is ready!

As with many other processes for capturing learning, Learning Teams has a recipe for success and unless you get all of the ingredients right, your cake is going to taste pretty awful and nobody will want to come to your next party! The main ingredient? The right culture! Don't bother with Learning Teams without it!

What are Learning Teams?

At Paradigm we use Learning Teams to explore organisational drift. When we facilitate a Learning Team for a client we are essentially looking to prevent a possible future bad or unwanted outcome; once the bad outcome has happened it's too late. In a Learning Team a group of knowledgeable people come together over two or more sessions to get a better understanding of a process, task or activity where we already know there is a difference between work as imagined and work as done but where we haven't yet experienced a bad or unwanted outcome, e.g. where we want to know whether we are being innovative or just lucky.

Who takes part?

The best Learning Teams have an owner who has skin in the game, i.e. they might own the process or have a key role in it. The best Owners are often Senior Leaders who have the autonomy to take action and the budget to agree a way forward. Without this, most Learning Teams turn into a non-value added talking shop.

The Facilitator is the person who runs the Learning Team. They work with the owner to identify the participants, set up the sessions and then facilitate the discussions within the room; the Facilitator doesn't need to know anything about the subject matter; in fact it's best if they know nothing so that their own biases don't limit the exploration.

The participants are selected from the group of stakeholders and must include people involved in completing the task or activity; there might also be a subject matter expert and representation from departments or third parties who impact, or are impacted by the topic being explored. An ideal quorum for a Learning Team is between 7-10 people.

How Long does it take?

How long is a piece of string? Ideally the Learning Team is split into 3 distinct phases -

1. Prepare
2. Conduct
3. Action

The main point is that Learning Teams are not a quick process, you will need at least a couple of days to do it justice, building in the soak time for participants to reflect on the learning up to that point and to consider and gather any additional information needed.

Lightbulb moment?

You are probably already thinking that a Learning Team is a costly and time-consuming exercise and therefore isn't an option for everyday run of the mill challenges and you would be right! Rushing through a Learning Team for a minor issue, without the right preparation, facilitation and participants undermines the appropriate use of the tool. There are other, more cost-effective and less time-consuming tools available for solving minor problems!

Sounds great, so what's the problem?

For a Learning Team to be a valuable, enjoyable learning experience both for the participants and the organisation, you have to have the type of environment where people are able and want to talk openly and honestly about how work really gets done, without being fearful of retribution or reprisal. This is where I see many organisations fail. They don't have that environment of trust and their people are reluctant to say they don't or can't follow procedures or rules and so they don't - and they end up creating an even more complex 'Work as Imagined' paradox.

Investigation or Learning Team?

Traditionally, when things go wrong in our organisations we investigate. We determine what happened and why and then if we're any good we might come up with some corrective actions in the hope of preventing a reoccurrence. These actions often look like retraining our people, writing new or revising old procedures, disciplining or firing 'errant' workers and telling the rest of our people to take more care and pay more attention. In the world of HOP we refer to this as 'fixing the worker' and whilst this might sometimes be an appropriate course of action, it doesn't address the underlying organisational system, process or value that lead to the bad thing happening in the first place. Therefore the word 'Investigation' can strike fear into the hearts of our people who feel cheated by the process and under-valued by the organisation for doing the best they could given the set of circumstances they found themselves in at the time.

If you are still a traditional organisation stuck in this 'Name, Blame, Shame and Retrain' cycle and are looking to get better at focusing on system fixes following an incident please do not think that Learning Teams is the antedote - it isn't! There are a few more steps to go through before you introduce them.

Learning Maturity

The first step in moving forward is to admit you have a need to change. Have a look at the causal factors and root causes of your recent incident investigations; if you see 'Human Error' coming up again and again, it is likely that your corrective actions will look like those 'fix the worker' ones I detailed above. It is also possible that your people will feel that the investigation process is little more than a punitive tick box exercise. When interviewed they tell us what they think we want to hear, we fix the living daylights out of worker after worker and yet the same or similar incidents occur. Everyone knows the system is broken but nobody wants to write it in an investigation report, very few people want to hear it and hardly anyone has the time, resource and wherewithal to do anything about it! Hardly the fertile soil needed to plant the new seeds of operational learning and expect them to prosper.

Once you have gathered enough evidence to prove to yourself that you really aren't very good at investigating, you can start to apply a different paradigm to investigations where people want to contribute to the right corrective actions because they are being listened to and they know that the corrective actions will be aimed at 'fixing the system' and not punishing them. If you're not sure what this looks like then start by adopting this mindset for every investigation, the rest will surely follow:

Our people are good people doing the best they can with the tools, equipment and environment we provided for them. Their decision/s made perfect sense to them.

Then ask this question and look to answer it with your investigation:

How did I/we create an environment in which this was able to happen?

You will see a shift. You might experience:

• Better quality near hits which cite organisational drift
• An increased number of minor incidents being reported
• More engagement from workers during 'time in the field'
• Workers asking different questions of management
• Workers being more actively involved in problem solving

Once this starts to happen you will hear and see the language and the behaviours change right across the organisation. It takes time but it does happen with active involvement, consistency and commitment from Leaders.

With the positive change in attitudes and behaviours around drift from your people and a positive response from Leaders, comes new opportunities to ask new questions and expect even more honest answers. Eventually you arrive at a place where there is very little to investigate because you now have a culture which proactively seeks out and shines a light on black spots and grey areas before they become bad outcomes.

Now is the time to introduce the practice of Learning Teams.

Too many organisations have come to the realisation in recent years that they are pretty rubbish at investigations and that their people don't like them; adopting Learning Teams with the intention of improving attitudes towards unwanted outcomes, without changing the process is not a solution. In two year's time your people will hate Learning Teams even more than they hate Investigations today.

I am a great proponent of changing the association to a word rather than replacing the word itself - look how well replacing the word 'blame' with 'responsibility' worked out for us - when did responsibility become a bad thing! and so I am always clear on this - when something has gone wrong we investigate; that's what we know and expect - don't mess with it. When we want to learn more about a topic of interest such as a process, task or activity, or when we are planning to introduce something new and we want to make sure we've considered all the pro's and con's we conduct a Learning Team. Simple and no confusion!

So what now?

If you are reading this and thinking "Oh darn it - we already made that very mistake!" or "Oh crikey, what will we put in the improvement plan instead?" don't worry - I feel your pain, along with the hundreds of other organisations queuing to get their serving of Learning Teams training from the latest self-professed 'Guru'. You can still make your Learning Teams effective:

1. Be very clear on when and how they are to be used, i.e. not to investigate a bad outcome.
2. Circle back and make sure that you have highly trained and competent people conducting robust HOP-centric investigations into the things that have already gone wrong and if not get them trained. Yes, this is something I can help you with!
3. Make sure the focus of your corrective actions shifts to 'organisational' fixes and not 'worker' ones.
4. At the beginning of each Learning Team, discuss Dekker's drift model and explain that you are there to explore the gap between work as imagined and work as done.
5. Don't half-arse a Learning Team - invest the time, resource and effort into conducting a deep-dive exploration into something that really needs addressing and that will add value to the way in which work really gets done.
6. Acknowledge the elephant in the room - assure participants that this is a safe environment where no topic is out of bounds and the success of the event is dependent upon everyone sharing their honest experiences and thoughts, regardless of the culture outside the room! Then make sure that the confidentiality is protected at all costs.

Everyone wants to be the front-runner when some new sexy idea comes along which is supposed to be an answer to everything and Learning Teams are no exception. My advice is hang back on this one, there is lots to learn from those who jumped the gun and are now stuck between a rock and a hard place - having extolled the virtues of this new approach only to see it plummet like a dead pigeon because they didn't have the organisational maturity to make it fly, and unable to go back to where they were before because they told everyone investigations were a crock and there is no such thing as a root cause.

Be patient, hurry up and wait already! However, if you are determined to forge ahead regardless, choose your Guru wisely, don't be too quick to part with your hard earned readies and remember that not all experts are expert!